Is the apartheid colonial settler state of Israel “reparations” for Jews? ADOS thinks so.

ADOS stands for American Descendants of Slaves, a group founded by
Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, supposedly advocates of reparations
for the descendants of Africans enslaved in the US. Moore is a former LA
County prosecutor, Carnell a former US Senate staffer, and both have
been blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing and fishing in the waters of
corporate social media a good while now.

ADOS has strong ties to Republicans and racist white supremacists.
Its co-founder Yvette Carnell sits on the board of the cynically
misnamed Progressives For Immigration Reform , an outfit founded by noted white supremacist John Tanton, who’s been trying to manufacture black and so-called environmentalist organizations to parrot his racist views on immigration, eugenics and more
since the 1970s. It’s a match made in heaven for PFIR, which has
struggled to invent or find a black group to fly their crooked flag for
four decades, and if things work out it’ll be a good career move for
Carnell too. CNN, Fox News or ABC would be delighted to bring on a
charismatic black commentator willing to spout Trumpist talking points
interspersed with faux reparationist rhetoric. If Yvette does get a
broadcast talking head job out of this, that might be the only piece of
#tangibles2020 that comes out of the current presidential campaign.

We live in a nation where most people cannot find the countries their
tax dollars pay to bomb every day on a map, a country where sixty
million (mostly) white people voted for Trump. There’s no reason to
imagine this proud North American ignorance of history, the planet and
its people is confined to white Americans. When Barack Obama threatened
to bomb Syria, polling showed that black people, always the least
hawkish of US constituencies, were more inclined to war than their white
neighbors. So the appearance of a social media savvy right wing black
reparationist group, with hashtags like #lineagematters followed by 3 or
4 American flags, a group which claims the exclusion of Mexican,
Central American, African and Caribbean immigrants is necessary to
protect the livelihoods and social capital of black Americans should be
no surprise.

Popular support for empire, such as can be obtained, depends, as we
have observed before, on lots of fake news and fake history. ADOS
embraces capitalism, empire and the American Exceptionalist ideology
that goes with with it. Until now, black reparationists have aligned
themselves with colonized people around the world. But true to its roots
in social media and right wing politics, ADOS takes the short cut, to
embrace the racist narrative of Zionism. ADOS leaders and followers
routinely assert that US military, diplomatic, financial support of
Israel’s apartheid regime are examples of “reparations for the Jews,” in
support of its own reparations claim in the US. The Jews got theirs,
ADOS followers say, pointing to Israel. It’s time we got ours. This is
both telling and pernicious for all kinds of reasons.

The fact is that since the fall of the old regime in South Africa 25
years ago, Israel is the world’s premiere apartheid state, viciously
persecuting Africans, Arabs and anybody else it deems not “Jewish,”
however they define that. The fact is that Zionists, and the Zionist
project was never about representing all Jews, or making a home for all
Jews, or reparations for the persecuted. It has always been about using
Jewish nationalism to establish a settler state. To depict a racist
settler state as an example of restorative justice requires bottomless
cynicism on the part of leaders who know better, and deep historical
ignorance on the part of followers who don’t.

In the absence of real journalism, for which Julian Assange may be on his way to a Guantanamo torture cell for practicing, such narratives are easily disseminated on Twitter and YouTube, where the flat earthers, the moon landing skeptics, the birthers and the folks warning us about us about the lizard people all have big followings too. But none of them enjoy shoutouts from Cornel West, none of them try to wrap themselves in the just cause of reparations and none of them aim to affect the 2020 elections. ADOS does.

We’ll talk more about that some other time. As my colleague Glen Ford
says, we need to pass HR 40. I agree. Ford says we need an extended
debate among black people on just what reparations and restorative
justice look like. That sounds sensible. But it’s hard to imagine how
such an exchange 3can take place in an atmosphere of willful ignorance
and disinformation. And somebody really should talk to brother Cornel.

For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries, I’m Bruce Dixon. Please find our
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